Review | Urban Trial Tricky

LifeisXbox’s Urban Trial Tricky review | Massive respect if a bell starts to ring with Kikstart from Mr Chip Software. Most of you might have a ‘huh, what is that?!’-face and that’s fine! This game was the inspiration for one of Ubisoft’s most hardcore games, the Trials series. This franchise with an exclusive Xbox history spawned more similar games like Joe Danger and… Urban Trial Tricky! Tate Multimedia’s take on the genre is very similar but a bit more friendly for all gamers. You don’t need god-like skills to complete the challenges and controllers will be relieved as they won’t be smashed to pieces from frustration. Being more accessible comes with positives and negatives. So read on if the game interests you!

This is a short review, our usual the good, mixed and the bad was difficult because of the nature of this game. We played Urban Trial Tricky for three hours on Xbox Series X.

Urban Trial Tricky’s smooth gameplay and visual style instantly put a smile on my face, the colorful and bright environments are very well made. Stages are small compared to others in the genre but for me, that’s a positive element. Learning to visualize the designs ain’t so hard and as a result, your combo’s can be insanely large. Tate Multimedia created a very user-friendly campaign mode that learns the player how to effectively play the game, all the basics are covered and they take their time making sure that you understand the mechanics. Physics are the greatest enemy in this genre, making Trials frustratingly fun and that’s also the case with Urban Trial but far less gushy. Making it so much easier to play for casual gamers or people who don’t want to invest hours and hours to master something. No, they kept it simple with a control scheme that’s easy to learn. X and Y do tricks and B turns you around. Some of the harder tricks require a combination of button presses, which annoyingly doesn’t always work.

Waiting for you are 30 missions with collectables and all kinds of score or task challenges. It doesn’t reach frustration levels like Trials but prepare for some trial and error with later stages! Giving everything more meaning are two motivational in-game reward currencies. Stars for beating score challenges that unlock events and money for purchasing new tricks, avatars or bike types. A nice touch is the developer scores, beating a dev at their own game feels wonderful. Less wonderful are the difficulty spikes near the ending, in combination with tricks that sometimes fail to work it can be a bit annoying. It feels a bit basic too as if it lacks something to give it true replay value. One would immediately think multiplayer but they have that covered with stage leaderboards. Maybe some more variation in stage structure would have helped to keep it more interesting and fresh…

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